Why Morton Feldman?

Some readers may wonder why I just decided that amateur pianists (such as those that will be performing at the Cadillac Hotel in about a month’s time) deserve to be better informed about composer Morton Feldman. One reason is that, at the beginning of next month, harmonia mundi will release an album of the four compositions that Feldman collected under the title The Viola in My Life. As most readers will expect, Amazon.com has already created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

Sadly, the last time I wrote about this music was when it was performed by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players in October of 2009. That was back when I was writing for Examiner.com, and it was one of those articles that I had not yet backed up before that site was shut down! This is unfortunate since, by that time, I had accumulated two recordings of The Viola in My Life, one in the CRI American Masters series and the other released by ECM Records.

Violist Antoine Tamestit on the cover of his Morton Feldman album (courtesy of [Integral])

In the context of that background, readers may wonder why I wanted to add another recording to my list. The answer is simple enough: While Feldman provided the notes, he was not strict about how those notes should be interpreted. As a result, each recording provides its own unique listening experience. Furthermore, the CRI release only accounts for the first three of the four “parts” in the composition, each requiring different resources as follows:

1. viola, violin, cello, flute, piano, and percussion
2. viola, violin, cello, flute, clarinet, celesta, and percussion
3. viola and piano

Like the ECM release, the new album includes the fourth movement for viola and orchestra. The orchestra is the Gürzenich-Orchester Köln conducted by François-Xavier Roth, and the violist for the entire album is Antoine Tamestit.

In preparing to write about this new release, I made it a point to visit the booklet and see where it stands alongside the booklets of the two previous albums. I have to say that the essay accompanying Tamestit’s performance was more satisfying than the text sources I had previously encountered. The author was Jean-Yves Bosseur, translated into English by Charles Johnson. What is important is that Bosseur begins by establishing context, goes on to a rich description for each of the four parts, and concludes with the “punch line” that “Feldman’s language goes far beyond any unilateral psychological meaning.”

Mind you, I am not sure that “meaning” serves as an “issue” when one is listening to this music. I would just as soon follow the lead of T. S. Eliot, whose “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” includes the following couplet near the beginning:

   Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
   Let us go and make our visit.

In that vein, Bosseur seems to be saying: “Don’t waste time thinking, just shut up and listen!” (I had only a few opportunities to converse with Feldman, and he basically said the same thing while trying to be polite about it.) If we are to take that advice, then there is much to be gained from just listening to Tamestit’s music for what it is.

Other Minds to Release New Feldman Album

Cover of the album being discussed (courtesy of Other Minds)

This coming Friday Other Minds Records will release its latest album entitled The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar. This is the title of a composition for solo electric guitar that Morton Feldman composed for his colleague Christian Wolff. The album is currently available for pre-order through a Bandcamp Web page, both for digital download and for a twelve-inch 45 RPM vinyl disc (which will also include the digital download). As is usually the case, that Web page also provides program notes for the album.

Feldman composed this piece in 1966, and Wolff performed it here in San Francisco that same year. That performance was recorded and was archived by KPFA. Sadly, when Wolff was traveling to Yale to play the piece, both his guitar and the only copy of Feldman’s score were stolen from his car. Presumably, the music has “survived” thanks to Wolff’s memory, possibly the KPFA recording, and a reconstruction of that score. According to Amazon.com, a score was published by Edition Peters in France in 2015. However, the Web page for that score is listed as “Currently unavailable;” and it is not listed at all on the French site. On the other hand, the work is included on an electric guitar anthology album of performances by Lars Ove Stene Fossheim, for which Amazon does have an MP3 Web page.

The Other Minds album has three tracks. The first of these is the 1966 recording. This is followed by a second recording of the same piece, recorded by Wendy Eisenberg in 2022. The final track is another Eisenberg recording, this one of Wolff’s “Another Possibility.” It was composed in 2004 as an homage to the Feldman composition based on a scrap of notation from Feldman’’s composition, which was found in the Feldman archives at the Sacher Foundation in Basel.

My interest in Feldman dates all the way back to my graduate student days, when I first came to know him through my acquaintance with John Cage. I also recall first meeting Wolff when he was still at Harvard University, prior to his move to Dartmouth. Sadly, I do not encounter performances of Feldman’s music very often, although I was more than a little surprised to see “The Viola in My Life” on the program of a LIEDER ALIVE! program in February of 2022. As a result, I am most delighted that this new release provides me with another opportunity to introduce Feldman (once again) to my readers!

Islandia Music Records to Launch Schick Series

Composer John Cage (photograph by Rob C. Croes for the Dutch National Archives, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

This Friday Islandia Music Records (the label managed by cellist Maya Beiser) will launch a multi-album series of recordings of performances by percussionist Steven Schick, collectively entitled Weather Systems. The title of the first album is A Hard Rain. Most of the release is devoted to innovative approaches to percussion that were explored during the Fifties and Sixties. The contributing composers from that period are (in order of appearance) John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Feldman, Charles Wuorinen, Helmut Lachenmann, and William Hibbard. The album then concludes with an “electronic augmentation” of Kurt Schwitters’ “Ursonate.” Amazon.com has created a Web page for this new album, which is processing pre-orders. Unfortunately, it is only being distributed for digital release; but, fortunately, the download includes the accompanying booklet.

Where the content of this recording is concerned, anyone of my generation will probably see the elephant in the room. That elephant is the album Electronics & Percussion - Five Realizations By Max Neuhaus, a vinyl album released by Columbia Masterworks in 1968. That album is still available through an Amazon.com Web page at what may described politely as “collectors’ prices.” To the best of my knowledge, the CD version has only been produced by Sony Music Japan International, meaning that the price on the Amazon.com Web page will probably also only appeal to serious collectors. Two of the selections on A Hard Rain also appear on Electronics & Percussion: Feldman’s “The King of Denmark” and Stockhausen’s “Zyklus für einen Schlagzeuger” (cycle for a percussionist), given the number 9 in the composer’s catalog.

Now, to be fair, I enjoy the fact that anyone interested in either of these compositions has an opportunity to choose between performances or even listen to both of them. Nevertheless, I have to say that David Behrman tended to make better programming decisions than those made jointly by Schick and his recording engineer Andrew Munsey. As a case in point, consider the opening tracks on A Hard Rain.

The first of these is Cage’s “27 minutes 10.554 seconds” (I have chosen the headline used on the Wikipedia page for this composition to clarify the meaning of the title) scored for a solo percussionist. That meticulous approach to duration suggests that for this piece (and others titled only by the span of the duration), Cage was particularly interested in the interplay of sounds and silence. As a result, there are extended periods of silence in the performance, one of which occurs very early in Schick’s performance (so early that even I wondered whether there might have been a defect in the recording medium). The good news is that Cage was more interested in the general qualities of the passing of time than he was in how time is shared through the alternation of sounds and silence.

However, this becomes problematic on Schick’s new recording when the Cage selection is followed by “Zyklus.” The latter also involves the alternation of sound and silence, since the percussionist has to rotate himself in a circle, surrounded by the instruments he is playing. Stockhausen’s silences tend not to endure as long as Cage’s, but they are just as much a part of the music-making process. The problem, however, is that any listener that is not watching the clock while listening to Cage’s composition will probably have a hard time recognizing when the Cage piece ends and the Stockhausen piece begins! Behrman, on the other hand, ordered the selections on his album in such a way that one could detect significant qualitative changes in progressing from one piece to another.

Is this a matter of picking insignificant nits? Personally, I do not think so. I believe that every composer has a right to have his music recognized as such, even if the indeterminacy of that music is a significant element in the behavior of listening. Thus, while the performer may have to contend with watching both clock and notation at the same time, the listener should only have to focus on listening. In other words, while I can appreciate A Hard Rain as a valuable catalogue of compositions from the middle of the last century, I feel that the production has overlooked the fact that the listener also has a “point of view,” which tends to be even more important when indeterminacy is involved.

The good news for Schick is that the prevailing “digital mindset” is no longer constrained to honor the “program” defined by a recording. One can listen to any track in isolation as easily as one can shuffle the ordering of all of the tracks. (When the tracks are digital, one no longer has to worry about whether or not they are on the same CD!) Were Cage still alive, I suspect that he would relish the ways in which one may take a more creative approach to the act of listening. (On the other hand, I am not sure that either Stockhausen or Feldman would agree with him on this matter!)

Nevertheless, perhaps because my values seem to become more old-fashioned as I get older, the Neuhaus album still appeals to me more than the Schick album does. However, that is just my state of mind in the immediate present. If I spend more time listening to A Hard Rain, who knows where or how my tastes will shift!

More Songs Without Words from LIEDER ALIVE!

Violist Paul Yarbrough and pianist Jeffrey LaDeur (courtesy of LIEDER ALIVE!)

This month will conclude with the second of the three Songs Without Words programs scheduled for the tenth season of LIEDER ALIVE! Once again the program will feature pianist Jeffrey LaDeur, who will serve as accompanist for violist Paul Yarbrough. There will also be a slight “bending of the rules” with a special guest appearance by mezzo Kindra Scharich.

Scharich will perform an introduction for the major duo offering on the program, Benjamin Britten’s Opus 48 “Lachrymae.” This was composed as a reflection of two songs by John Dowland, “Flow My Tears” and “If My Complaints Could Passion Move.” As an introduction to the Britten composition, Scharich will sing both of these songs, accompanied by LaDeur. Yarbrough will begin the program joining LaDeur in a performance of Robert Schumann’s Opus 113 four-movement Märchenbilder (fairy tale pictures) suite. The duo will then follow the Britten selection with the third of Morton Feldman’s “The Viola in My Life” compositions, the only one in the set of four scored for viola and piano. Finally, they will conclude the program with the viola arrangement of the second of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 120 clarinet sonatas, composed in the key of E-flat major.

This performance will take place at 5 p.m. on Sunday, February 27. As usual, the venue will be the Noe Valley Ministry, located at 1021 Sanchez Street, between 23rd Street and Elizabeth Street, a short walk from the Muni stops at the corner of 24th Street and Church Street. Tickets for this concert are being sold through an Eventbrite Web page. General admission is $35 with a $75 rate for reserved VIP seating. Students, seniors, and working artists will be admitted for $20 with a $2.85 processing fee.

Igor Levit’s Century of “Encounters” on Sony

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

One week from today Sony Classical will release its latest solo album of performances by pianist Igor Levit. The title of the new album is Encounter, following up on the one-word title of his last album, Life, released in October of 2018. (That release provided the program for a United States tour, which brought Levit to Herbst Theatre for a San Francisco Performances recital on November 1, 2018.) As is usual practice, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders for the new recording.

Most of the two-CD album consists of “encounters” in which one composer reworks music written by a predecessor by transcribing the music for solo piano. The chain of these encounters has been well considered by Levit. He begins with Ferruccio Busoni’s transcriptions of ten chorale chorale preludes that Johann Sebastian Bach had originally composed for organ. The remainder of the first CD then concludes with transcriptions of six more organ chorale preludes composed by Johannes Brahms.

That second set marks the beginning of a “chain” that links to the second CD. At the beginning of that CD, Brahms becomes the object of transcription with Max Reger’s solo piano reworking of Brahms’ Opus 121 set of four “serious” songs. Reger himself is then the next object of transcription with Julian Becker’s solo piano account of “Nachtlied” (night song), the third of eight sacred songs in Reger’s Opus 138 collection. This time the music leads to a different logic of sequencing. The stillness at the conclusion of “Nachtlied” makes a smooth transition into the beginning of Morton Feldman’s “Palais de Mari” (named for a monumental Babylonian structure in what is now Syria). The extended duration (almost half an hour) of Feldman’s composition makes for a radical shift in durational scale, since none of the preceding tracks on both CDs are longer than seven minutes. This was the last piece that Feldman composed for solo piano prior to his death on September 3, 1987.

While the very act of transcription may be viewed as a “dynamic of encounter,” there is an emerging quality of stillness that cuts through the entire recording, culminating in the sustained Zen-like stasis of the Feldman composition. Given that most chorale preludes were composed for periods of silent meditation during church services, almost all of the tracks that lead up to “Palais de Mari” can be approached as preparatory in nature. (There are, of course, exceptions. The BWV 615 “In dir ist Freude” is positively exuberant and is as spirited as the opening of the last of the Brahms Opus 121 songs.) However, the text for the Reger song by Petrus Herbert almost amounts to a secular requiem; and Reger’s homophonic setting clearly evokes Bach’s own homophonic chorale settings.

Taken as a whole, then, the experience of listening to Encounter is one of negotiating an elaborate Web of interconnections, culminating in the subtle interweaving of motifs in “Palais de Mari.” Indeed, the structural detail brings to mind the lecture that Alban Berg prepared prior to the premiere of his Wozzeck opera, which presented the whole three-act opera as an elaborate interconnection of well-crafted component elements. That said, however, it is important to recall how Berg concluded his lecture. He told everyone in the audience to forget about all those details and just come back the following night to enjoy the opera! By the same count, one can easily enjoy the individual moments of Encounter without taking into account how they are connected with other moments.

Thoughts About a Rothko-Feldman Connection

This morning I decided to watch the recording I had made of John Logan’s play Red, which seems to have been conceived as a dramatized study of the painter Mark Rothko and the (perhaps hypothesized) ideas behind the creation of at least some of his paintings. The play was first performed at the Donmar Warehouse in London, opening on December 8, 2009. The role of Rothko was taken by Alfred Molina, and the director was Michael Grandage.

Rothko (Alfred Molina) and his assistant (Alfred Enoch) preparing a canvas (screen shot from the preview video on the Great Performances Web page for Red)

On March 11, 2010, that production was given a limited run on Broadway at the John Golden Theatre. That run lasted for a little more than three months, but it was enough to earn that year’s Tony Award for Best Play. In 2018 the play was revived in London on the West End, again with Grandage directing Molina, joined by Alfred Enoch in the role of Rothko’s assistant. A video recording of that production was first aired in the United States on November 15, 2019 as part of the PBS Great Performances series. This morning I viewed a rebroadcast of that program.

My awareness of Rothko owes much to the influence of the composer Morton Feldman, initially through a recording of “Rothko Chapel” released by New Albion Records. That influence was reinforced in April of last year, when the “ONLINE series” of programming by the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players presented a performance of Feldman’s “For Samuel Beckett.” The video recording of that performance was introduced by local composer Amadeus Regucera, who chose to dwell on the “Rothko connection.” He observed that Rothko created vast canvases; but, when one stood close to one of these paintings, one no longer saw large masses of color but could, instead, attend to the intricacies of texture emerging from evidence of the brushstrokes.

Regucera’s perspective never arises in Logan’s play. Indeed, the Rothko character seems only interested in having his vast spaces viewed from a distance. However, he is also interested in talking at great length to his assistant about what he does, why he does it, and what he thinks about the artists that preceded and followed him. In the former category his primary focus is on Jackson Pollock, while there is an extended salvo at the prevailing Pop Art movement in the latter category. (For the record, Feldman does not appear ever to have met Rothko; but he did come to know Pollock during his time working with John Cage.)

The Rothko conceived by Logan and Grandage and realized by Molina has his own connection to music. A record player is a significant element of the set design; and, when he is not talking at length, much of Rothko’s activity takes place with accompaniment from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (primarily symphonic but with one operatic extract). This is complemented by the tastes of his assistant, who is preparing a frame while listening to his own recording of Chet Baker. Rothko is not shy in venting his displeasure.

Perhaps I am just being contentious, but I tend not to enjoy plays that consist almost entirely of stentorian lectures. If Rothko was really the sort of person to fire off one of those lectures at the drop of a hat, then I have to credit Molina for nailing that personality trait. Nevertheless, I am not quite sure about all the verbiage aimed at either the act of looking at a Rothko canvas or the philosophical perspectives on the canvas itself. As a result of listening to Feldman, I find that, when I encounter a Rothko on exhibit, my own impressions begin simply with an awareness of being in its presence, almost as if the painting is a portal to some other-worldly space that I shall never be able to experience directly.

To be fair, that frame of mind would probably not sell very many tickets in either London or on Broadway. However, by that same count, Feldman recordings are still not “best sellers.” As far as I can tell, the closest he has ever gotten to a GRAMMY award would have been by way of a performer or ensemble that received the award, not necessarily for the actual recording of his music. That said, I still would prefer listening to 90 minutes of music that reflects on reactions to looking at paintings to 90 minutes of lecturing by the artist that created one of those paintings!

Capriccio Releases New Album of “Coptic Light”

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month, Capriccio released a new recording of two compositions by Morton Feldman performed by the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, the performing orchestral ensemble for the Austrian national broadcaster Österreichischer Rundfunk (ORF). Both compositions are a little less than half an hour in duration, and both can be taken as representative of how Feldman was influenced by abstract painting and the connections of that genre to earlier forms of visual art. The first selection is Feldman’s final completed work, “Coptic Light,” written on a commission from the New York Philharmonic in 1986 and first performed on May 30 of that year. The second, “String Quartet and Orchestra,” was written in 1973, also on commission, this time from the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and its Principal Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT). Each of these pieces has its own conductor, Michael Boder for “Coptic Light” and Emilio Pomàrico for “String Quartet and Orchestra.” On the latter track the performing string quartet is the Arditti Quartet, which has championed Feldman’s music, as well as the works of his former colleague John Cage.

The only time I met Feldman, he was very reluctant to talk about his work. (In fact, all I could get out of him was encouragements that I should be talking to Christian Wolff instead.) On the other hand Feldman’s writings could bring considerable clarity to listening experiences that might otherwise come across as dispassionately remote. In that context I feel that the best way to approach “Coptic Light” is through what Feldman himself wrote about it:

Having an avid interest in all varieties of arcane weaving of the Middle East, I recently viewed the stunning examples of early Coptic textiles on permanent display at the Louvre. What struck me about these fragments of colored cloth was how they conveyed an essential atmosphere of their civilization. Transferring this thought to another realm, I asked myself what aspects of the music since Monteverdi might determine its atmosphere, if heard 2000 years from now. For me the analogy would be one of the instrumental imagery of Western music. These were some of the metaphors that occupied my thoughts while composing Coptic Light. An important technical aspect of the composition was prompted by Sibelius’ observation that the orchestra differed from the piano mainly in that it has no pedal. With this in mind, I set to work to create an orchestral pedal, continually varying in nuance. This “chiaroscuro” is both the compositional and the instrumental focus of Coptic Light.

On a more personal note I would say that, perhaps because of the influence of those textiles, “Coptic Light” serves up far more instrumental coloration than I have encountered in most of Feldman’s compositions. That coloration arises through his “signature” technique of frequently repeated motifs and the overlay of different durations for the cycle of each of those motifs. I tried dealing with this technique in Feldman’s “Piano;” and it nearly drove me crazy. When listening to a piece like “Coptic Light,” I do my best to let go of my analytic side and simply let my ears find their own way in surveying the rich landscape of sonorities that Feldman created.

In some respects I would have preferred that the album had presented its two compositions in chronological order. “String Quartet and Orchestra” is an earlier venture into Feldman’s “landscape” approach. However, because of the instrumentation, one is more aware of the interplay between individual instruments and ensemble sonorities. I might even argue that “String Quartet and Orchestra” provides an excellent instance of “ear training,” which will inform how the “mind behind the ear” approaches listening to “Coptic Light.”

Feldman is one of those composers whose listening experiences are best approached by a somewhat Zen-like precept:

The best way to learn how to listen to Morton Feldman is to listen to Morton Feldman.

During his tenure as Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, MTT provided several valuable opportunities to listen to Feldman’s music performed, rather than recorded. I valued every one of those that I attended. I wish there could have been more, but I was well aware of how many members of the audiences were shuffling around in restlessness. The best MTT could do was to lead the horse to water, and that was greatly appreciated by those of us that knew how to drink!

An Introduction to Morton Feldman from SFCMP

Those following the concert offerings of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) probably know about the pre-performance demonstrations and discussions that are prepared by Artistic Director Eric Dudley under the title How Music is Made. In response to the current shelter-in-place imposed in the interest of social distancing, Dudley has taken How Music is Made into cyberspace with “ONLINE series” programming enabled through the SFCMP YouTube Channel. Each of these programs will involve a video document of the performance of a single composition preceded by an introduction presented by (as SFCMP has put it) “some of contemporary music’s most inspired personalities.”

The first offering in this series was released this past Friday, but today provided my first opportunity to check out the viewing/listening experience. The performance was of Morton Feldman’s “For Samuel Beckett,” which was captured on video when it was conducted by Steven Schick in the Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on January 19, 2016. The introductory presentation was delivered by the young composer Amadeus Regucera. Regular readers may recall that percussionist Andy Meyerson played Regucera’s bass drum solo, “IMY/ILY” as part of the “Humble Servant” concert he presented this past September.

The Feldman selection was definitely a bold choice for launching this series. For over half a century I have been listening to Feldman’s music going all the way back to the early pieces he composed in his days with John Cage as part of what is now called “The New York School.” That was a time when Feldman was exploring indeterminacy with scores consisting of rectangles on graph paper, allowing performers extensive opportunities for choice.

In his “post-Cage” period, Feldman would return to working with conventional notation. He tended to conceive structures that seemed repetitive on the surface but were distinguished by subtle differences. As his work progressed, his compositions took on longer and longer durations, leading to the completion of his second string quartet in 1983 that requires a little over six hours to perform.

Olesya Aleksandrovna Denisova’s portrait of Mark Rothko standing before one of his paintings (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Rather than taking a historical perspective, Regucera chose to focus on Feldman’s relationship to the painters of his time, dwelling particularly on Mark Rothko. He drew attention to the large dimensions of the paintings that Rothko began to create during the mid-Fifties. Regucera observed that, when one stood close to one of these paintings, one no longer saw large masses of color but could, instead, attend to the intricacies of texture emerging from evidence of the brushstrokes. The “message” from that observation is that a sensory impression that seemed almost uniform “in the large” concealed no end of subtle details “in the small.”

That observation may have provided the best possible frame of mind for approaching “For Samuel Beckett.” Images of specific score pages suggest that the music involved relatively short repetitive structures that would endure for considerable time. However, where the actual listening experience is concerned, Feldman introduces subtle interruptions to repetition. These interruptions are separated by significant intervals of time, so long that one cannot develop viable expectations for when they are likely to occur. Rather, they keep the listener attending to the small as the only way to appreciate change when it occurs.

In this context I found that, while listening to this music, I was recalling the penultimate sentence that is narrated at the end of the third movement of Luciano Berio’s “Sinfonia.”

We must collect our thoughts, for the unexpected is always upon us.

Repetitions are disrupted by unexpected changes, but those changes establish impact precisely by being unexpected. Feldman did not want listeners to approach “For Samuel Beckett” with the same confidence that faces the disruptive out-of-key recapitulation that undermines the flow of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 55 (“Eroica”) symphony in E-flat major (which almost all listeners enjoy by virtue of expecting it)!

One can probably say that the best way to approach compositions like “For Samuel Beckett” is with attentive patience. Sustaining such patience over the duration of an hour is no easy matter. On the other hand a video document of a performance may have the upper hand when it comes to encouraging that approach.

One is not obliged to maintain a high level of attention for an entire hour. One can begin by acclimating to, say, about one quarter of that duration. Then one might extend one’s capacity for attention to roughly half an hour. In other words, like Feldman himself, the curious listener can adjust to sustaining durations of attention for longer and longer periods until one can stand before “Feldman’s canvas” (so to speak), aware of both the overall scale and the subtleties of detail.

A New Recording of a Major Feldman Composition

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

Back in my student days, one of my music professors used to delight, every now and then, in citing his list of the major “non-composers” of our day. The list might change from time to time, but Morton Feldman was always on it. I do not know whether he really meant to dismiss Feldman so abruptly or if this was a “cunning plan” on his part to get his students to listen to recordings of Feldman’s music (which were pretty sparse back in the Sixties when I was in that professor’s classroom).

The other way I learned about Feldman was through John Cage, with whom I went on mushroom hunts in the summer of 1968 and then would encounter as often as circumstances would allow. Feldman had been Cage’s colleague in what is now known as “The New York School;” and Cage continued to champion him after they had gone their separate ways. Unless I am mistaken, my first listening experience came from a vinyl Columbia album that divided its tracks between Cage and Feldman.

It did not take long for me to warm up to Feldman’s music. However, I quickly realized that he was very much an experimentalist, exploring different compositional techniques. His earlier efforts involved approaches to indeterminacy that were inspired by Cage’s interest in chance-based approaches to decision making but were far from following in Cage’s footsteps. However, Feldman gradually departed from scores consisting of rectangles on graph paper that allowed extensive opportunities for choice by the performer to a far more meticulous technique in which every individual note would be specified with respect to not only pitch but also dynamics and often articulation.

As Feldman’s scores became more precise, they also became much longer in duration. Unless I am mistaken, his demands on listener attention were pushed to the max with the completion of his second string quartet in 1983. The total duration of the recording of this quartet made by the FLUX Quartet is (as it says on the album cover) “6 hours 7 minutes and 7 seconds.” That recording requires five CDs.

To be honest I have never been interested in approaching an opportunity to listen to Feldman’s music as if it were an endurance test. As a result, I have tended to settle into those compositions whose performances fill a single CD without any interruptions. One such composition is “Patterns in a Chromatic Field,” a duo for cello and piano.

This past October Wergo released a new recording of this piece performed by cellist Mathis Mayr and pianist Antonis Anissegos. Note the use of the article “a.” An Amazon.com search for “Morton Feldman patterns” turns up an impressive number of different performances. It almost seems as if any cello-piano duo that is interested in an ambitious challenge has turned to “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” and released a recording of their efforts. (Personally, I have only one other copy, the recorded performance made by cellist Christian Giger and pianist Steffen Schleiermacher. I was drawn to it because I knew of Schleiermacher’s project to record the complete piano music of John Cage.)

These days I am more interested in attending concert performances of Feldman’s music than in listening to recordings. Indeed, I can confess that, when I started listening to this recent Wergo recording, I no longer had any recollection of the Giger-Schleiermacher recording. Nevertheless, my past experiences in being able to identify motifs and then track the gradual transformations of those motifs kicked in with little difficulty. The fact is that it is not difficult to become aware of those transformations and to accept the principle that the “destination” of a transformation is secondary to the transformational process itself. That precept and a willingness to be patient are about all one needs to bring to a “CD scale” Feldman composition; and, on this new recording, that patience is definitely well rewarded.

Another Major Reissue from HAT HUT

Morton Feldman at the 1976 Holland Festival (photograph by Rob Bogaerts, from Wikimedia Commons, made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication)

This past spring I wrote about how the Swiss HAT HUT label has been reissuing its earlier recordings. The reissues are being given what amounts to a “paperback” treatment, replacing the traditional “jewel case” with simpler (and much thinner) cardboard packaging. The latest round of these reissues took place this past October, and I was glad to see that it included an album consisting entirely of music by Morton Feldman.

If Feldman’s music received relatively less attention that it deserved during his lifetime, his scores saw an increasing number of champions after his death in 1987. Here in the United States, Mode has a “Feldman Edition,” whose releases have not been particularly systematic but have been consistently valuable for those interested in listening to informed performances of Feldman’s music. Mode has never been afraid to take on his long-duration compositions, the most massive of which was his second string quartet performed by the FLUX Quartet with a total duration of a little more than six hours.

That album was released in 2002; but in 1998 HAT HUT released a four-CD album of a performance of “For Philip Guston,” recorded at the Slee Concert Hall at the University of Buffalo in August of 1991. The performance was given by Eberhard Blum (piccolo, flute, and alto flute), Nils Vigeland (piano and celesta), and Jan Williams (glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, and chimes) and lasted about four and one-half hours. Last month’s reissue was first released in 2000, based on recordings made in October of 1997. The original Web page on Amazon.com still exists and presumably is now being redirected to the reissue.

The title of the album is Atlantis, which is also the title of the last of the three pieces on the recording. All three are scored for large orchestra; and, on the recording, Lucas Vis conducts the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. The two compositions that precede “Atlantis” are “String Quartet & Orchestra” and “Oboe & Orchestra.” Those two pieces were composed in 1973 and 1976, respectively, by which time most of Feldman’s titles had more to do with instrumentation than anything else.

“Atlantis,” on the other hand, was composed in 1959 and may well be Feldman’s earliest effort in working with a large ensemble. (I only encountered Feldman’s name for the first time when I was an undergraduate in the mid-Sixties. Leonard Bernstein tried to conduct one of his pieces at a New York Philharmonic subscription concert. All I remember is that the music critic for Time described it as sounding “like noodle soup going down the drain.”)

During the Seventies Feldman tended to take a mosaic-like approach to composition. In the time I spent with the score of “Piano” (completed in May of 1977), even though I never felt that I came even close to being able to play the music properly, I developed an appreciation of how the score had been constructed from a relatively limited set of “tiles of different colors,” which were then subjected to a wide variety of different patterns arising from collocation. The differences among those patterns, however, could often be so subtle as to escape the attention of “real-time” listening, particularly when the overall duration demanded more than an hour of attention.

In the 1973 and 1976 compositions, one can acquire some basic awareness of those tiles; but what is more likely to draw attention is the way in which Feldman creates and then resolves tensions between “concertante” sonorities and those of different groups of instruments in the ensemble. The respective durations of these two pieces are about one-half and one-quarter of an hour, making for manageable experiences that may well alternate between attentive listening and meditation. Indeed, because these durations are “manageable,” the compositions serve as useful exercises to engage before approaching Feldman’s more extended approaches to duration.

“Atlantis,” on the other hand, comes from a time when Feldman was using graph paper for his notation. The horizontal axis would represent time, and a number in a square would indicate the number of notes that would sound in the duration corresponding to the length of the square. The result amounts to a study that seems to reflect the pointillist technique of painting. However, while painters like Georges Seurat could use that technique to group the “points” in the interest of creating “shapes;” Feldman is clearly more concerned with the points themselves, particularly in how, through both superposition and succession, they may be distributed across the resources of a chamber orchestra. Since the duration is only a little more than ten minutes, the listening experience can be highly engaging due to the imaginativeness of the diversity of sonorities. On the other hand, once the listener “gets it,” (s)he will probably recognize that Feldman could go only so far with this technique, which is why the music composed in the Seventies is so different in its underlying logic.

SFCMP to Conclude Season with 4-Concert Weekend

Pauline Oliveros and Steven Schick (courtesy of SFCMP)

As was announced at the beginning of the season, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players (SFCMP) will conclude its 2017–18 season with a series of four concerts over the course of a single weekend. These concerts will celebrate two landmark occasions: the 85th anniversary of the birth of composer Pauline Oliveros and the conclusion of Steven Schick’s tenure as SFCMP’s Artistic Director. Presented as part of the at the CROSSROADS series, the offerings for each of the concerts will be as follows:

Concert #1: The featured work will be the world premiere of “Cold mountains, one belt, heartbreak green,” composed by Carolyn Chen for bass flute, violin, cello, and percussion under an SFCMP commission. The program will also present two “legacy” compositions, Galina Ustvolskaya’s “grand” duet for piano and cello (composed in 1957) and Luciano Berio’s 1964 Folk Songs collection. There will also be a performance of Xavier Beteta’s “La Catedrale Abandonata,” composed in 2015.

Concert #2: Oliveros will be honored with a performance of “The Witness,” a one-hour composition created in 1980. The program will also include world-premiere performances of three pieces inspired by Oliveros, all written by Bay Area composers under the age of 30. These will be Danny Clay’s “Playbook,” John Ivers’ “Bellow, Cycle,” and Nathan Chamberlain’s “Dawn Chorus.”

Concert #3: Schick will give a solo recital at which he will perform the world premiere of a new work by Celeste Oram. Other percussion pieces will include Vinko Globokar’s “?Corporel” and Iannis Xenakis’ “Psappha.” He will also perform selections from Kurt Schwitters’ four-movement “Ursonate.”

Concert #4: The final offerings will be a performance of Morton Feldman’s 90-minute “Crippled Symmetry,” scored for flute, percussion, and keyboardist alternating between piano and celesta.

The first two concerts will take place on Friday, March 23, followed by the second two on Saturday, March 24. On both evenings the first concert will begin at 7 p.m. followed by the second at 9 p.m. All events will take place in Z Space, located in NEMIZ (NorthEast Mission Industrial Zone) at 450 Florida Street. All of these events will be free to those who subscribed to the full season, and members will be entitled to a 20% discount. Tickets for a single concert will be $25 with a $14 rate for students. Tickets for any two concerts will be $40 with a $24 rate for students. A pass for the entire weekend will be $65 with at $38 rate for students.

That pass will also include a Farewell Reception and Toast to honor Schick. If purchased separately, a ticket for the reception will be $25. That reception will take place prior to Schick’s recital on Saturday, beginning at 5:30 p.m. The first concert on Friday will be preceded by the final How Music is Made event of the season. There will be an open rehearsal of Chen’s composition at 5:30 p.m., and Schick will engage in conversation with Chen for half an hour beginning at 6 p.m. There will be no charge for either of these events. Z Space has created a single event page for all advance purchase of tickets online.

Center for New Music: Remainder of September 2017

Plans now seem to have been finalized for the remainder of next month’s launch of a new season at the Center for New Music (C4NM). The one event that was given advance notice was the Banned Books Solidarity Concert, which will be presented by Phonochrome on the afternoon of September 24. C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of the Golden Gate Theater, which is where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Not all of the events listed below will have the same price of admission, so that information will be provided with the description of each particular show. However, all tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini event page. Hyperlinks to the appropriate Web pages will be attached to each of the dates in the following summary:

Sunday, September 17, 7 p.m.: Not to be confused with the verses of Ira Gershwin, Portato Portato is a chamber trio that divides its base between Oakland and Santa Cruz. The members are Jacob Lane on keyboards, Michelle Lee on flutes, and Jon Meyers on percussion. They play original works as well as selected compositions from this and the preceding century. When they work on new pieces, they are committed to an attentive relationship between the composer and the performers. Two of the works on the program will be by members of the trio, “Diaphane I” by Lane and “Daniel in Chicago” by Myers. They will also play Louis Andriessen’s “Melodie” and one of Morton Feldman’s major compositions, “Why Patterns?” General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members and students.

Wednesday, September 20, 8 p.m.: Following up on their free performance of Terry Riley’s “In C” as part of the Yerba Buena Gardens Festival, Brooklyn Raga Massive will come to C4NM for a concert that will be curated by Jim Santi Owen. This will actually be a subgroup of Brooklyn Raga Massive that calls itself the Raga Jazz Messengers, which plays a repertoire that combines the American Jazz Songbook with Indian Classical Music. (Whether or not Art Blakey has a place in that Songbook remains to be seen.) Personnel for this performance will be Sameer Gupta on drums, Pawan Benjamin on saxophone, Arun Ramamurthy on violin, Jay Gandhi on bansuri, and Michael Gam on bass. They will be joined by local guest artists making special appearances for the occasion. General admission will be $20 with a $15 rate for C4NM members.

Saturday, September 23, 8 p.m.: Eric Glick Rieman will lead a combo he calls the Knitting Ensemble for an evening of his own compositions. He will be playing a prepared and modified Rhodes electric piano. The remainder of the group will consist of Jakob Pek on guitar, Brett Carson on piano, and two percussionists, Nava Dunkelman and Suki O’Kane. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members.

Monday, September 25, 7 p.m.: Kurt Rohde will curate a two-set evening of local and visiting talent. The opening set will be taken by the local group, a newly-formed quartet, which probably will be named Black Gagaku. The group seems to have been formed by Kyle Bruckmann, who will be playing oboe, cor anglais, and electronics and will be joined by Jacob Felix Heule on percussion, Kanoko Nishi on koto, and vocalist Danishta Rivero. They will be followed by the Boston-based ensemble Ehnahre, which will be playing selections from its newest album, The Marrow. The performers will be Ryan Mcguire (vocals and bass), Richard Chowenhill (guitars), and Joshua Carro (percussion and electronics). General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members.

Thomas Moore Brings Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories” to C4NM

Morton Feldman would probably have objected vociferously to anyone trying to associate any of his work with the adjective “monumental;” but he, himself, described his 1981 “Triadic Memories,” his longest work for solo piano, as “probably the largest butterfly in captivity.” When I first started to try to write about Feldman’s music, based primarily on recordings, I realized that one could track the progress of his work in terms of his ability to work with longer and longer durations. By 1980 he had composed a piano trio, entitled simply “Trio,” that lasted for about an hour and 45 minutes. “Triadic Memories” is a solo composition conceived on a similar scale.

Nevertheless, the actually duration of the piece seems to have much to do with the frame of mind of the performer. The work was jointly commissioned by Aki Takahashi and Roger Woodward, both of whom recorded it. Takahashi’s recording lasts slightly over an hour, while Woodward’s comes closer to 90 minutes. Last night Thomas Moore visited the Center of New Music (C4NM) to give his own interpretation of this piece, a work he has been performing for 30 years. His performance expanded to a little under two hours.

Commenting on the length of his later works, Feldman was once quoted as saying:

Up to one hour you think about form, but after an hour and a half it’s scale. Form is easy—just the division of things into parts. But scale is another matter.

Curiously, however, Moore’s approach served up a clear sense of that division into parts, suggesting that Feldman himself may not have been that clear about his concept of scale.

One way to approach “Triadic Memories” is to think about it as an answer to a question posed as the title of Feldman’s 1978 work for flute, percussion and piano, “Why Patterns?” Cognitive science has its own answer to that question: The ability to organize sensory inputs into patterns is a fundamental (perhaps the fundamental) building block in the formation of the full cognitive capacity of consciousness. Ironically, this may not be far from what Feldman had in mind. His lengthier works often dwell on repeating figures that readily register with mind as patterns in their own right. Furthermore, when the repetition is not strict or when it is tweaked in ways that provoke (if not confound) expectation, one still recognizes the figures as patterns. Mind just as to work a bit harder to accept that they are there.

From this point of view, “Triadic Memories” is a journey through an extended sequence of patterns. Furthermore, the techniques that Feldman engages to move from one pattern to another lead to that “division of things into parts” that would suggest that “Triadic Memories” is, indeed, a matter of thinking about form. However, even the transitions have their own characteristic departures from the more “normative” approaches to form that we encounter so often in concert settings.

Feldman’s metaphor of the butterfly, however, may have suggested that he was not interested in a straightforward journey that goes from here to there. He may have had in mind that our perspective does not always see the butterfly as following such a direct path. Nevertheless, that path may have been a direct one for the butterfly! (A topologist once wrote a delightful essay for general readers entitled “Straight Lines of Many Shapes.”)

In terms of listening, one may say that “Triadic Memories” is not so much about going from here to there as it is a butterfly’s path that comes to rest to draw nourishment from a wide diversity of flowers. Each of those flowers is one of the elements of Feldman’s “form.” The listener need do no more than follow the butterfly from one flower to the next.

This raises the question of what it means for listeners to accept that role. In Davies Symphony Hall Feldman performances tend to be greeted with an onslaught of nervous coughing and program rustling. (For that matter, Toru Takemitsu got the same treatment in Herbst Theatre when Peter Serkin played his music there in November of 2006.) Last night’s audience at C4NM had no trouble accepting the quietude of Moore’s performance. Whether this was the silence of intense focus or whether it was just respect for letting the butterfly go its own way, this was an audience that knew not to shatter to delicacy of the occasion with their own petty discontents.

This was not an evening for remembering Feldman; rather it was an occasion to appreciate Moore’s efforts at keeping Feldman’s music alive and well.

The Bleeding Edge: 4/3/2017

It’s a new month, and things are starting to get busy again. That outdoor performance based on the Beowulf epic, which began around the middle of last month, is still going strong on the north waterfront. This week’s performances will take place on April 6, 7, 8, and 9. As has already been reported, April 8 will be a busy Saturday; and, for the adventurous, it will include the imaginatively-conceived program In Sea at the Center for New Music (C4NM). This will also be the next “double header” week from Outsound Presents with events in both the Luggage Store Creative (LSC) Series and the SIMM (Static Illusion Methodical Madness) Series. However, as Billy Mays liked to say, “That’s not all;” so here is the rundown of previously unreported events in chronological order.

Monday, April 3, 8:30 p.m., Make Out Room: Since today is the first Monday of the month, the week will begin with the next installment of the Monday Make-Out at the Make Out Room. As usual, there will be three sets of adventurous Bay Area jazz and improvised music. This month’s program will be entirely instrumental. The opening set will be taken by clarinetist Ben Goldberg, who divides most of his time between New York City and the Bay Area. He will be followed by John Schott’s Actual Trio, led by Schott on guitar with rhythm provided by Dan Seamans on bass and John Hanes on drums. The final set will be free improvisation by the trio of Rob Ewing on trombone, Karl Evangelista on guitar, and Jon Arkin on drums.

Doors open at 8 p.m., and the music starts a half hour later. The Make Out Room is located at 3225 22nd Street in the Mission, near the southwest corner of Mission Street. The Make Out Room is a bar. That means that tickets are not sold, nor is there a cover charge. Nevertheless, a metaphorical hat is passed between sets; and all donations are accepted, not to mention welcome!

Tuesday, April 4, 8 p.m., C4NM: Kyle Bruckmann will curate the next installment in the sfSoundSalonSeries. This will be a three-set evening of solo improvisations, each of which has taken its own direction to push the envelope of jazz practices. The improvisers will be John Krausbauer, C. Spencer Yeh, and Bill Orcutt.

C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, about half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members, students, and the underemployed. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Vendini event page.

Thursday, April 6, 8 p.m. C4NM: Soprano Jane Spencer Mills will present a program of art songs by local poets and composers. C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, about half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Vendini event page.

Thursday, April 6, 8:15 p.m., Luggage Store Gallery: This week’s LSC gig will consist of three half-hour sets of electronic improvisation. TM Duplantis will lead off with his ventures into eight-bit digital noise. He will be followed by Raub Roy performing as Scy1e. The final set will be taken by Waxy Tomb. The Luggage Store Gallery is at 1007 Market Street, directly across from the Golden Gate Theatre at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Taylor Street. As always admission will be on a sliding scale between $6 and $15.

Saturday, April 8, noon, Noisebridge: Noisebridge is a shared space in the Mission to which all are invited to work on technical-creative projects. The facility is “doocratically run by everyone.” Every month the group runs a GODWAFFLE NOISE PANCAKES event at which gourmet vegan pancakes are served in a context of experimental acts, electronic sounds, and noise. The event runs for two hours, over the course of which there will be performances by Dinosaurs With Horns (LAFMS), Mochipet, Tom Djill, Bloody Snowman, and Mas Coad. Noisebridge is located at 2169 Mission Street, two blocks south of the BART station at 16th Street. There is no charge for this event, but Noisebridge operates entirely through monetary donations. Operating expenses are over $5000 per month. The Noisebridge home page has information about both membership and ways to donate.

Sunday, April 9, 3 p.m., C4NM: Danny Clay will curate a solo piano recital by Patti Deuter at which she will perform one of Morton Feldman’s last piano compositions, “For Bunita Marcus.” C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, about half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance online through a Vendini event page.

Sunday, April 9, 7:30 p.m., The Musicians Union Hall: The first set of the next SIMM Series concert will be taken by the Social Stutter Quartet. This group consists of four saxophonists. Both Beth Schenck and Kasey Knudsen play also, while Phillip Greenlief and Cory Wright play tenor. Wright also doubles on baritone. The second set will feature the compositions of Bill Noertker performed by his group Noertker’s Moxie. Noertker plays bass along with Annelise Zamula on both alto saxophone and flute, Eli Wallace on piano, and Jason Levis on drums. The Musicians Union Hall is located at 116 9th Street, near the corner of Mission Street. Admission is on a sliding scale between $10 and $15.

Ensemble InterContemporain Considers New York on its Latest Alpha CD

This past Friday the Alpha recording label released its third album featuring Ensemble InterContemporain and its current Artistic Director and conductor Matthias Pintscher. The title of the recording is New York, and it is the first album in the series to focus on American music. Over the course of two CDs, the package offers a profile of some of the more “bleeding edge” examples of music created by composers living in New York.

The first of those composers, Edgard Varèse is not, strictly speaking a New Yorker. However, he is represented by “Intégrales,” which is one of the pieces he composed while living in New York. The “New York School” is represented by its two members that could definitely be counted as New Yorkers, John Cage (even though he was born in Los Angeles) and Morton Feldman. Similarly, Elliott Carter was very much a New Yorker; and some of Cage’s writings even cite what it was like having Carter and his wife as neighbors. The generation subjected to influences from both Cage and Carter is represented by Steve Reich. Finally, there are two composers of roughly the same age, who may be regarded as representative of the current generation of New Yorkers, Sean Shepherd and David Fulmer.

Beyond any geographical base of operations, the seven compositions in this collection have one thing in common. None of them were intended for “casual” listening. This seems entirely appropriate, since casual listening was probably the last thing on Pierre Boulez’ mind when he created Ensemble InterContemporain. While this makes the album a valuable document of creative practices emerging from New York over the last 100 years, it also poses a cognitive challenge that should not be disregarded. Each of these seven pieces has its own unique point of view, and that point of view is not necessarily reinforced by listening to any one of these works before or after another track on the album.

Nevertheless, the juxtapositions of the track arrangement occasionally bring some interesting insights to the surface. The first CD begins with “Intégrales;” and, while I would like to say that this piece has been around long enough that we can sit back and enjoy it as much as, say, one of the late quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, the truth is that this just ain’t so. Scored for eleven winds and enough percussion to require four players, “Intégrales” is as spiky as ever. However, after one accepts the spikes for what they are, the music offers up a visceral experience that feels as if it will never be dated; and Ensemble InterContemporain has no trouble keeping those spikes as sharp as ever.

In the track ordering “Intégrales” is followed by Carter’s clarinet concerto. Now it turns out that Carter was a Visiting Professor at the Massachusetts Institute Institute of Technology during my senior year there. What this meant in reality was that he would come by once a week to give a somewhat rambling seminar on whatever topic happened to interest him at the time. On one of those occasions the topic of Varèse arose, but all Carter wanted to talk about was the friction between Varèse and Nadia Boulanger. There was a faint subtext in his approach to Varèse that sounded a bit like, “I paid my dues; why didn’t he pay his?”

In that personal historical context I found myself struck by the extent to which the dissonances in Carter’s concerto were not only as spiky as Varèse’s but could almost be taken as downright reminiscent of them. Mind you, Carter wrote this concerto over 30 years after Varèse’s death. (He wrote it for the twentieth anniversary of Ensemble InterContemporain, which makes it a particularly appropriate selection for this album.) Thus, one of my own reactions to listening to this recording was one of revelation, musing over whether Carter had come to a stage in his personal sense of aesthetics at which he could admit (and even leverage) the idea that Varèse may have been up to something with consideration!

Those wishing to start their listening experiences with something more “accessible” would probably do well to select the second CD in this collection and turn to Reich’s “WTC 9/11.” This piece was scored for string quartet and tape and written for the Kronos Quartet. In many respects it complements “Different Trains,” which was also introduced in both concerts and recording by Kronos. Both pieces explore the potential for melodic contours in spoken text; and, of course, both are unabashedly political. “Different Trains” was basically reflections on the Holocaust by a Jew who escaped that catastrophe by having been fortunate enough to be born in the United States. “WTC 9/11,” on the other hand, was about a catastrophe that took place in the composer’s “home town” (a town whose environment he had previously celebrated in “City Life”). Curiously, this is not the first time that “WTC 9/11” has been recorded by a European ensemble, since there is also a recording made by Quatuor Tana. On this recording the performers are violinists Jeanne-Marie Conquer and Diego Tosi, violist Grégoire Simon, and cellist Eric-Maria Couturier; and they certainly know how to bring clarity to what Reich had in mind in creating this piece.

The most surprising selection in the collection is probably Cage’s “Music for Wind Instruments.” Composed in 1938, this was a piece in which Cage used the twelve-tone technique to provide him with a systematic approach to pitch selection. He was equally systematic in determining how silences were added to the overall structure. The piece is in three movements, the first a trio (for flute, clarinet, and bassoon), the second a duo (for oboe and horn), and the last a quintet for all five instruments. Given Cage’s “bad boy” reputation (which is probably as fresh today as it was 75 years ago), the music is surprisingly affable, thus offering a striking contrast to the dissonances of Varèse and Carter. Considering the level of rhetorical intensity in this album’s perspective on New York, it is nice to know that Cage’s “sunny disposition” (his choice of words) provides the listener with a chance to enjoy a smile or two. The two younger composers that contributed to this album might make a note of how effective Cage could be in that regard!

Center for New Music: Early March 2017

Having observed the absence of word from the Center for New Music (C4NM) about this month’s activities, I figured I would take some of the more personal notifications I have received as a point of departure for accounting for the first full week in March and that month’s preceding half-week. This will be a rather busy time, including a Sunday with performances in both the afternoon and evening. For those who need reminding, C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, half a block north of where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street. Tickets for all events enumerated below are now available for advance purchase online through the indicated hyperlinks:

Friday, March 3, 8 p.m.: This will be a two-set evening of audiovisual improvisations. In the opening set Bill Hsu will improvise video displays in real time to complement the musical improvisations of James Fei and Gino Robair. The second set will present live coded video created in real-time by Shawn Lawson in response to electronics provided by Ryan Ross Smith from a secret remote location. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Saturday, March 4, 8 p.m.: Pianist and vocalist Jenny Maybee will lead her band in a program of new compositions and arrangements on the themes of love, transformation, exploration, and state of being entitled Sacred Landscapes. General admission will be $20 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Monday, March 6, 8 p.m.: Casey Grev will give a solo saxophone recital augmented with electronics and multimedia. The program will consist of new and recent works by Georges Aperghis, Jason Thorpe Buchanan, Ann Cleare, Dai Fujikura, Ravi Kitappa, Alex Mincek, and others. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Wednesday, March 8, 8 p.m.: Trumpet virtuoso Andy Kozar, currently based in New York City, will present a program of five recent pieces for trumpet and electronics. These will be “Flutter” (Tyler Harrison), “Deviations from a Theme by Brahms” (Elizabeth Hoffman), “Still Life” (Scott Worthington), “Moving Target” (Jeff Gavett), and “Rahab’s Herbarium” (Adam Zahller). On the basis of this excerpt, it would appear that Hoffman’s Brahms source has been significantly concealed:

uploaded to YouTube by Andrew Kozar

Kozar will also perform in a set of improvisations with local performers including Tania Chen on piano, vocals by Ken Ueno, and Matt Ingalls on clarinets of different sizes. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Saturday, March 11, 8 p.m.: Utter will be a solo concert by Anne La Berge featuring interactive works that weave together performer, audience, and digital technology. “Utter” is also the concluding work on the program, composed by La Berge for flute, electronics, narration, and interactive tablets. There will be three other “flute++” compositions, “Delay/Line” by Sam Pluta, “Modes of Assisted Ventilation” by Hugo Morales, and “Telemachus” by David Dramm. The program will begin with Yannis Kyriakides’ “Oneiricon,” scored for tablets and musicians without the instruments being specified. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Sunday, March 12, 3 p.m.: This will be the first of two concerts to be curated by Danny Clay on the same day. The Cornelius Cardew Choir will perform the second “paragraph” from Cardew’s The Great Learning, his settings of seven paragraphs from the first chapter of Great Learning, the first of the so-called “Four Books” that illustrate the core value and belief systems of Confucianism. Cardew composed this piece for his Scratch Orchestra, whose performance of this particular paragraph is available on YouTube:

uploaded to YouTube by tiovelvet

This paragraph was composed for singers and drummers and consists of a single (large) score page. That page is divided into three columns:

1. a very slow, long-tone melody with one of more words specified for each tone
2. 26 rhythm patterns
3. a lengthy description that accounts for how the singers deal with the melody, how the rhythmic patterns are to be performed, and an overall description of the entire performance

In the spirit of the Scratch Orchestra, the Cornelius Cardew Choir, founded here on May 1, 2001, brings together professional, amateur, and novice singers who collectively work to turn their ideas into sonic action. While the above video lasts about twenty minutes, Cardew’s score specifies that the duration of this paragraph should be about one hour. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

Sunday, March 12, 7 p.m.: The second concert that Clay will curate will be a solo recital by pianist Adam Tendler. Tendler has prepared a program entitled still that will bring pioneering compositions by John Cage and Morton Feldman together with more recent works by Charlie Sdraulig and Marina Poleukhina. General admission will be $15 with a $10 rate for C4NM members. Tickets may be purchased in advance through a Vendini Web page.

San Francisco Conservatory of Music: November, 2016

As was the case with the current month, this seems like a good time to provide readers with a heads-up for some of the key activities planned for the following month at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM). All events will take place in the SFCM building at 50 Oak Street, between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street, a short walk from the Van Ness Muni station. As always readers are encouraged to consult the Events Calendar at the SFCM Web site for the most up-to-date information about any of these offerings. Also, as was the case for October, this preview article will begin with the Faculty Artist Series. Program details have not yet been released for any of these concerts. However, all of them will be free; and no reservations will be required. The four November concerts in this series are as follows:

Monday, November 7, 7:30 p.m., Recital Hall: Indre Viskontas is a soprano with an SFCM Masters degree in opera (class of ’08); and she also holds a Ph.D. in cognitive neuroscience from the University of California at Los Angeles. She is also a co-founder of Vocallective, a consortium of singers and instrumentalists dedicated to the art of vocal chamber music. Her presentation will be a lecture-demonstration entitled Tracking Time, which will deal with the question of how brains perceive and track time. The first half of the program will deal with the “processing” of one of the string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven. Viskontas will be assisted by a performance given by the members of the Telegraph Quartet (violinists Joseph Maile and Eric Chin, violist Pei-Ling Lin, and cellist Jeremiah Shaw). In the second half Viskontas will turn to the distinction between “clock time” and subjective awareness of the passing of time. Examples will be provided through compositions for voice (Viskontas), string quintet (Telegraph joined by Stephanie Payne on bass), and piano (Keisuke Nakagoshi). The composers will be Gabriel Fauré, Aaron Copland, and Ernest Chausson.

Monday, November 14, 7:30 p.m., Concert Hall: This will be a solo recital by pianist Sarah Cahill. She will be joined by violinist Kate Stenberg and percussionist William Winant. The three of them will perform Lou Harrison's "Varied Trio," which Winant previously recorded with violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg in the New Albion label. (This was the group that gave this composition its premiere performance.) Stenberg will also join Cahill in a performance of Henry Cowell's 1945 sonata for violin and piano, which they performed last month in the Sunset Music | Arts recital series. Cahill will also perform works for solo piano by Ruth Crawford Seeger, the sixth and ninth preludes (which she composed in 1927 and 1928, before she met Charles Seeger, whom she would later marry), Frederic Rzewski's “Peace Dances,” George Lewis’ “Endless Shout,” and Terry Riley's ragtime composition, “Be Kind to One Another.”

Sunday, November 20, 2 p.m., Concert Hall: This will be a solo recital by pianist William Wellborn.

Monday, November 28, 7:30 p.m., Recital Hall: Guitar alumnus Giacomo Fiore (’09) will present a program entitled Sixty Years and Counting, in which he will review the repertoire of the electric guitar in the role of a “concert” (his scare quotes) instrument. This will be a lecture-performance that will include five performances. These will be Morton Feldman's “The Possibility of a New Work for Electric Guitar” (composed in 1966 and reconstructed in 2015), “Interpolaciones,” scored for electric guitar and multi-channel electronics by Cesar Bolaños, Tristan Murail's “Vampyr!,” Larry Polansky's “34 Chords (Christian Wolff in Hanover and Royalton),” and Eve Beglarian's “until it blazes.”

November will also see two concerts presented in conjunction with Artist Residencies, both of which involve the return of previous resident visitors to SFCM:

Thursday, November 3, 8 p.m., Concert Hall: The visiting artist will be Geoff Nuttall, first violinist and co-founder of the St. Lawrence String Quartet. During his past visits, he has performed in groups of different sizes based on the students he has been coaching during his one-week residence. This concert will be free, but reservations will be required. SFCM has created a Google Form Web page for processing reservations.

Thursday, November 10, 8 p.m., Recital Hall: The following week the visiting artists will be the husband-and-wife duo of violinist Donald Weilerstein and pianist Vivian Weilerstein. The program will included two duo performances, a suite by Henry Cowell and Charles Ives’ first sonata for violin and piano. The second half of the program will consist entirely of Antonín Dvořák’s Opus 87 (second) piano quartet in E-flat major. The original requirement for tickets has been waived. This concert will be free, and no tickets for reservations will be required.

There will also be two concerts by students in the Historical Performance Department, both of which will be free and will not require tickets:

Sunday, November 6, 2 p.m., Recital Hall: Corey Jamason will lead the Baroque Ensemble in a program of arias from the early operas of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Sunday, November 13, 2 p.m., Concert Hall: The Baroque Orchestra will present a program of two rarely performed instrumental suites by Georg Philipp Telemann, La bizarre and La changeante.

In addition the New Music Ensemble will present a politically-charged pre-election concert. The program will present two unique approaches to the setting of highly political texts. The first piece will be the cantata Katrina Ballads, composed by Ted Hearne, who prepared a libretto based on source texts created in conjunction with the disaster brought on by Hurricane Katrina. This will be followed by Frederick Rzewski’s “Coming Together,” which uses a text from an inmate of the Attica State Prison in New York, the site of riots in 1971 that disrupted “business as usual” in New York state politics. This text is narrated, and the narrator for this performance will be Angela Davis. The New Music Ensemble will be led by visiting conductor Alan Pierson, Artistic Director of both Alarm Will Sound in New York City and Crash Ensemble in Dublin. This concert will begin at 8 p.m. on Friday, November 4. Admission will be free, and no tickets will be required.

Semper Fi!

I was trying to figure out why Google Analytics was showing an active interest in my national site for Examiner.com coming from the IP address for Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point. Then I saw that the piece I wrote about a Naxos recording of Gerard Schwarz conducting the United States Marine Band was responsible for a surge of hits coming to that site. By way of comparison, the hit rate for that article is the same as the one for my latest report on the Mode Records' Feldman Edition recordings. Semper fi, Morty!